LUTHULI REMEMBERED
ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: How to transform the enemy through love
July marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Albert Luthuli, head of the ANC from 1951 to 1967. Sadly, it did not get the attention it deserved.
Luthuli was the first African Nobel peace laureate in 1960. The award was an attempt to highlight apartheid brutalities. He titled his autobiography Let My People Go, borrowed from an American civil rights-era spiritual: "Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land; tell old Pharaoh let my people go!"
Appropriately linking the anti-apartheid and civil rights struggles, Luthuli and 1964 Nobel peace laureate Martin Luther King Jnr, issued a joint declaration against apartheid in 1962. Both Gandhian prophets shared an undying belief in nonviolent struggle, as well as in the ultimate triumph of the human spirit over oppression.Luthuli was a traditional chief from KwaZulu-Natal who was able to bridge the divide between the urban and rural masses of Africa’s oldest liberation movement. He was involved in the Defiance Campaign of 1952 and led acts of civil disobedience, for which he was jailed and banned. However, he stuck to his principles of Gandhian nonviolent passive resistance (though he noted that he was not a pacifist), advocated economic sanctions against the apartheid regime and pushed for the inclusion of all racial groups in the liberation struggle. For Luthuli, who was steeped in Christian beliefs, the road to freedom lay through the cross; sacrifices and suffering would be ...
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